Specialist women top list of childless

The Age, June 26, 2008

THEIR work as doctors, lawyers, vets and dentists keep them occupied in different ways, but for Australian women in these professions there is a common trait — they are childless.

Melburnians lead the childless charge and more than 40% of all women living in the capital cities of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane were childless. This was a rise of more than 9% over 20 years.

Research from the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling at the University of Canberra has found that childlessness among women working in specialised fields is at 60%.

Comparing census data from 1986, 1996 and 2006, researchers have tracked the trend in childlessness among professional women over time and found that while there has been across the board growth, the rises among specialised professionals are fractional: from 57.9% in 1986 to 60.3% in 2006 among the four chosen professions.

There were about 33,000 women working in the selected fields of law, medicine, veterinary science and dentistry in 2006, making up 1.4% of the female workforce.

Childlessness among other working women has also increased with 53.6% of professionals and managers without children and 48.5% of women in "other occupations" including clerical, sales and tradespeople.

The research, to be presented at a major population conference next week, aimed to build on previous knowledge that more educated women are less likely to have children, as are women living in cities compared to those in regional and rural areas.

Women in the "special occupations" of law, medicine, veterinary science and dentistry were selected to test whether women in those types of occupation had different rates of childlessness to the rest of the working population over time.

Report co-author Justine McNamara said it was interesting that among women in specialised occupations, childlessness had not increased nearly as much as it had for others.

"Certainly, although these women have very high rates of childlessness in comparison with other women, those rates of childlessness have grown at a smaller rate," she said.

By comparison, childlessness for women in managerial professions had increased by 10% from 42.9% in 1986 to 53.6% in 2006.

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